Don't You Love When Your Interests Start to Converge?

[RobCole]

I have been active in the 3D graphics communities and virtual worlds for a few years now. I made friends with some people who started their own virtual world company called Reaction Grid and rendered their company logo in 3D for them.

Now they are coming into my work world by bringing a hardware kit into the virtual world. Now you can use items in the virtual world to control signals in the real world and vice versa.

The first instance of this I ran across was a group from MIT who modeled a Foosball table in Second Life where you could set your avatar up as one of the players on the field. As people played the table at MIT, the one in the virtual world did the same motions.

I want to play with this new kit. Now... What to control and what to build in a virtual world to control it?....

Rob

[SteveChandler]

How about a car?

[RobCole]

Are you talking about building a car in a virtual world that would drive one in the real world? Very scary.

Or one in the real world that makes one in a virtual world move. Still scary, but not overtly dangerous.

Rob

[SteveChandler]

I was talking about driving a real car from a virtual world. I can't give a link from my phone but youtube has videos of remote control cars. Yes real automobiles. This could be doable but don't go out on the public roads or you might get pulled over. Wait... 🙂

[RobCole]

Yes, the Waterloo Labs video.

I remember that one quite well. Nice way to use your cRIO.

Not quite the same as driving from inside a virtual world.

You could, if you wanted something useful, build a virtual robot that matches moves with a real world robot (either one in control).

Rob

[Ben]

I'll throw out an idea to help your brainstorming...

Do you remeber a game called "Skittle bowl"?

Replace the string with a rod throw in some sensors and motors you could work it forward (real word mimiced in virtual) or backwards (virtual drives the real world).

My wife thinks I am silly when I loved the Winter Olympics and curling. I loved the slow motion physics.

Ben

[Ray.R]

You guys have not seeb the virtual vehicle which is basically a golf cart with a video game mounted onto it.  Some University did this.

It has cameras to monitor the path in front of the cart and it changes the display on the video game so that you drive it in the same path within the video gane as in the real world..  It was shown on the Discovery channel